In the opening pages of Brian K. Vaughan’s graphic novel Y: The Last Man, a plague instantly sickens and kills every living being with a Y chromosome on the planet (with the exception of eponymous protagonist Yorick Brown and his pet monkey). The sudden and seemingly total absence of men creates an apocalyptic power vacuum as the surviving women, globally underrepresented in all civic institutions dedicated to preserving law and order, scramble to reorganize and preserve human civilization. This talk proposes to read Y as a pop culture thought experiment in different responses to dismantling the connection between social manifestations of power and the male body. Y makes the feminist project of unhinging the social symbols of power from the male body not only necessary for preserving civilization, but also hypothesizes that the loss of this system of social organization would be mourned even by those it undoubtedly damaged. The graphic novel therefore demonstrates some possible outcomes and psychic responses to a radical reorganization of power along the lines of gender. The female characters assume power in ways ranging from inspiring (the creation of an idyllic socialist community led by former prisoners) to disturbing (the formation of “the Amazons,” radicals whose brutal violence betrays a melancholic and self-destructive internalization of patriarchal values, symbolized by their amputation of one breast). I propose to explore how Y: The Last Man translates the abstract theoretical connections between gender, power, and the body into a postapocalyptic plot, and will thereby argue that the thematic resonance of the book moves beyond a pop culture thought experiment to an investigation of the connection between trauma, language, and the human capacity to heal through artistic expression.
About the presenterTracy L. Bealer
Tracy Bealer is an Associate Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American pop culture and genre fiction, and has published and lectured on the intersection of gender and politics in film, television, and comics. Bealer co-edited Neil Gaiman and Philosophy and is currently working on a book-length study of Megan Abbott. She writes about true crime and crime fiction in her Substack newsletter, True Crime Fiction.